Love Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde makes self-love sound like scandalous gossip, which is exactly the point. “The beginning of a lifelong romance” turns what Victorian morality treated as a private duty (self-respect, self-discipline, the sober Protestant inventory of one’s soul) into something flirtatious, aesthetic, and faintly improper. He doesn’t say self-love is healthy or necessary; he says it’s romantic. That’s Wilde’s signature maneuver: smuggling a critique of social virtue inside a line that purrs.

The intent is double-edged. On its face, it’s a bright prescription for confidence. Underneath, it’s an attack on the culture that demands self-erasure in the name of respectability. Wilde lived in a world where appearances were policed, desire was dangerous, and sincerity was often a performance. To call self-love a “romance” suggests you should treat your own life with the same attention you’d lavish on a lover: curiosity, tenderness, even indulgence. It’s a rebuke to the idea that worth must be conferred from outside - by class, by marriage, by applause.

The subtext carries Wilde’s irony, too. Romance is dramatic; it’s prone to self-deception. Loving oneself can be liberation, but it can also slide into narcissism, the very vice polite society loves to condemn while quietly practicing. Wilde frames the self as both beloved and author: if you must live in a theater of judgment, at least write yourself as the central character rather than the understudy.